Gore Vidal

“Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.”

“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”

“There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.”

“Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god's purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.”

“Boys don't like girls around when they do boy things.”

“Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.”

“At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice.”

“Certainly 'The Judgment of Paris' was the novel in which I found my own voice.”

“Now you have people in Washington who have no interest in the country at all. They're interested in their companies, their corporations grabbing Caspian oil.”

“It's odd to meet a rather elderly man who says, 'I've been reading you all my life.' It makes you feel a slight chill.”

“I was raised in the Washington household of my grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, and have known politicians intimately all my life.”

“After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generations, the British maintained an old-fashioned colonial empire, as well as a modern empire based on London's primacy in the money markets.”

“It's always best to stay out of other people's divorces. And their civil wars.”

“Every generation gets the Tiny Tim it deserves.”

“From April 1775 to July 1776, the undeclared war between England and its American colonies smoldered, flared up, appeared to sputter out... It was hardly, ever, a mass rebellion.”

“After adolescence, if one's life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.”

“What I am is something unbearable for the world of journalism and the world of cliches. I'm a realist.”

“Andy Warhol is the only genius I've ever known with an I.Q. of 60.”

“In August 1961, I visited President Kennedy at Hyannis Port. The Berlin Wall was going up, and he was about to begin a huge military buildup - reluctantly, or so he said, as he puffed on a cigar liberated by a friend from Castro's Cuba.”

“I don't even read most reviews, unless there is a potential lawsuit on view.”